Gaming predictions for 2013

While gaming didn’t have a great year overall, it’s really made up for lost time with the incredible success of Halo 4 and Call of Duty Black Ops 2.

The gaming market can be very unstable, but for right now, things are really going like gangbusters. Will it continue into 2013?

According to some experts, the first quarter of 2013 should do very well, just like the last quarter of this year really picked up with Halo and Call of Duty. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, most of this year’s gaming sales were slipping because of less people buying console games. While bigger sales of mobile and digital games didn’t offset the losses, experts have been predicting that a "video game reset," or a "trend reversal"should kick in very soon.

Again, the recent explosive success of Halo 4 and Call of Duty shows how up and down the market can be, because until those games broke big, gaming had been declining all year. Indeed, the industry has been on the slide for several years, while one analyst feels a big factor is "the relentless decline in packaged good software sales." But many analysts have also looked forward to this Thanksgiving as the big turning point, and again, some predict there will be a big turning point within the first quarter of next year.

If the turning point comes on schedule, which is within the first quarter of 2013, software sales could potentially go up to nearly 50%.

Interestingly, Grand Theft Auto V alone could help the business grow by 16 to 30%. It definitely looks to be the big blockbuster game for next quarter, but as we recently reported on TG, there’s a number of other potential blockbusters coming next year as well like Bioshock Infinite, the Tomb Raider reboot, the post-apocalyptic game The Last of Us, and more.

This all sounds very good for gaming, yet with the unpredictability of the market, you really never know where things are going to land. Yet for right now, if gaming is your business, business is definitely very good these days.